25 June 2017

Ok, look. I absolutely possess incompetence at humaning. People who like me express non-rhetorical doubt about my material humanity. Anything that involves being any good at politics is precisely what I can't do for half a distant squeaky noise at an antique hinge convention.

And I know that "change the system" is inherently nonsense; the point of a system is that you can't change it. (If you can change it, it isn't a system; it hasn't got feedback that keeps it stable.)

What you can do is replace the system. The way you replace the system is by finding the people who experience uselessness in the current system and convince them that your proposed change gives them use and significance. People will do almost anything not to be useless. (Most of the current anglosphere political struggle is over whether non-white, non-male people can have inherent utility, as distinct from the derivational utility of making white, male people happy.)

So, not only would Bernie not have won, arguing that Bernie would have won is a way to avoid acknowledging that the voting is not fair and open so it really doesn't matter who would have won a free vote; the core threat from Hillary is not personal incompetence but demonstrating non-white, non-male inherent utility in unequivocal ways. (Guess why the votes are free and fair. Go on, guess.) Can't have that; there's a clear majority of folks who the current system insists are inherently useless, and they're way more numerous than the middle aged white males who figure their uselessness is someone else's fault and stop thinking there. (It's not obviously a false conclusion, but stopping there and blaming who you're told to blame isn't especially clever.)

There's another bit about La Dauphine and whether it's real desire for post-patriarchal power structures or the cynical appearance of such a desire. And still a third bit -- of course we want a different system. The current system has failed utterly. We're having a self-inflicted existential crisis for the next hundred years because that was apparently easier and better than not being quite as rich.